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Limited Availability of New Second Life Regions


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6 hours ago, Macrocosm Draegonne said:

prims are limited to 10m size

Sure 'nuff -- hadn't noticed that, and I'm sorta surprised it's still possible to set that limit.

Other thing I noticed, even though I knew llHttpRequest() is currently disabled on the AWS sims, I'd forgotten I make http calls to fetch region name from a cap, given global coords, so it's not all about "phoning home" to external or in-world LSL-based servers.

(I also noticed some flakiness about parcel name not showing up in the viewer I was using, but I haven't investigated that one at all.)

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14 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Sure 'nuff -- hadn't noticed that, and I'm sorta surprised it's still possible to set that limit.

Other thing I noticed, even though I knew llHttpRequest() is currently disabled on the AWS sims, I'd forgotten I make http calls to fetch region name from a cap, given global coords, so it's not all about "phoning home" to external or in-world LSL-based servers.

(I also noticed some flakiness about parcel name not showing up in the viewer I was using, but I haven't investigated that one at all.)

I'm still excited to see what they can do with aws, thats all server-side, which might be able to improve region crossings, group chat lag, bring some additional types of sims perhaps, and of course be able to spin up new sims a lot easier/faster. I also saw a viewer note in a release recently about "Vulkan Detection" in the viewer, does that mean the viewer will get a transition from OpenGL? I think so, however long it takes. There are middle-ground way's to do it from what I've read, to ease the transition.  More good things to come! :)

Edited by Macrocosm Draegonne
spelling! ooff... >.>
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11 hours ago, Macrocosm Draegonne said:

I also saw a viewer note in a release recently about "Vulkan Detection" in the viewer, does that mean the viewer will get a transition from OpenGL?

Likely so. Per @Inara Pey's report of a Third Party Viewer Developer meeting in late June:

Quote

[21:15-22:15] In response to a question it was reiterated that Vulkan is being given serious consideration as the rendering API to replace OpenGL, given Apple’s intent to deprecate the latter.

  • One potential issue is that a lot of older PCs used with SL do not have support for Vulkan.
  • To assist in determining how big an issue this might be, the Arrack Maintenance RC viewer includes logging code to detect Vulkan support within client systems.

 

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On 8/7/2020 at 9:14 AM, Qie Niangao said:

Likely so. Per @Inara Pey's report of a Third Party Viewer Developer meeting in late June:

"One potential issue is that a lot of older PCs used with SL do not have support for Vulkan.

  • To assist in determining how big an issue this might be, the Arrack Maintenance RC viewer includes logging code to detect Vulkan support within client systems."

 

I hope they had good stats on their inspections! For the majority, its simply needing a driver update lol...

It will be extremely nice to have a fresh graphics system. It almost goes without saying there will come a time (if not now, soon) that catering too much to older systems becomes a detriment to current users & potential users. For windows (near 90% of real Computers globally) you must have windows 7, 8.1, or 10 for vulkan, which even win10 is going on 6 years, win7 is 11 years old now. Anyone using older versions are irrelevant, and... treading on dangerous, buggy, laggy, crappy grounds! 🤪  Same goes for antiquated OS, barely (if at all) supported by manufacturer, most have reached EOL, officially, even older linux branches.

Im still excited tough, I dont care how long it takes, or if we as a community have to contribute, test, support, drive revenues to the project, etcetera, it will be an epic upgrade. Becoming more GPU reliant, multithreading, all the bells & whistles possible to make, etcetera, its more verbose, but more powerful, as im reading.... im not some code genius, but I tinker & dig a lot. If its insane costs, perhaps only have SL with the new vulkan digs to start, and let the older system persist on Opensim? hmm that might seem devious to some, but I dunno, im rambling, ill stop now lol.

2018-Vulkan-small-badge.png.06f4281d0576814136c2a9ff154b05bb.png

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2 hours ago, Brianna Harley said:

Is this actually slowing down the moving of current regions, separating one from others?  

I dont think so, I think its only for adding entirely new regions, they have plenty to shuffle around for current needs, as was stated previously, they simply dont want to add more new capacity of the older systems.

 

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On 5/23/2020 at 7:27 AM, Mediev Nostram said:

They've been working on it a couple years and still haven't been able to make their software run on another server?  Seriously?  That kind of failure doesn't seem possible. 

Second Life is old, Really old. It hates being upgraded, Poked and prodded at. Anytime they touch critical areas. Second Life often throws a fit and they have to fix it, If SL was a 2020 Virtual World with Modern Hardware then it won't cause that much issues.

I just know back then in the past they had to change server hardware and it caused SL to go nuts before many years ago. But once SL gets new modern 2020 hardware and upgrades I am sure its fits will be reduced not 100% eliminated but at least it won't break the next thing in line.

That's just MY observation I been in SL since 2007 and I kept track a bit here and there on there server upgrades over those years. Not all the time but once and while. Second Life never was built to run on the Cloud and that was not an option in 2004 (And even if it was, It's not as advanced as what we have today) so this will be new for SL and I am exciting for this upgrade.

If it taken them years I can see why sense Second Life launched in June 23, 2003, I doubt cloud servers existed in those times.

Anyways that's all I have to say, A Linden can explain it in better detail than me.

Edited by FurryWolf Rayna
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On 8/24/2020 at 6:54 PM, FurryWolf Rayna said:

Second Life is old, Really old. It hates being upgraded, Poked and prodded at. Anytime they touch critical areas. Second Life often throws a fit and they have to fix it, If SL was a 2020 Virtual World with Modern Hardware then it won't cause that much issues.

I just know back then in the past they had to change server hardware and it caused SL to go nuts before many years ago. But once SL gets new modern 2020 hardware and upgrades I am sure its fits will be reduced not 100% eliminated but at least it won't break the next thing in line.

That's just MY observation I been in SL since 2007 and I kept track a bit here and there on there server upgrades over those years. Not all the time but once and while. Second Life never was built to run on the Cloud and that was not an option in 2004 (And even if it was, It's not as advanced as what we have today) so this will be new for SL and I am exciting for this upgrade.

If it taken them years I can see why sense Second Life launched in June 23, 2003, I doubt cloud servers existed in those times.

Anyways that's all I have to say, A Linden can explain it in better detail than me.

AFAICT they've been running their own personal "cloud" for SL, virtualization has been around a very long time, its "mostly" hardware agnostic other than the brute force it can bring to bare, the cloud is more a marketing term than some modern tech. I'd argue its the considerably wide availability/access to mega data centers, with dwindling prices (as big fish monopolize & compete), thats what the cloud brings. There is a lot of great software that leverages it though, I love it and for many years have used the cloud for webservers.

Its not that sl is old really, especially not as businesses go, whats more true is it has lasted longer than most games tend to do. They have kept up with upgrades, improvements, and code the whole way thru, constantly developing.  Sure, they didnt jump head on into huge overhauls at every turn, thats expensive, and risky, both of which gets laid on a userbase in games, for good or bad. I'd argue that the choices they've made have been both lucky and solid steps.

Given all this cloud power they can ease into the mix for infrastructure, to the software side with a Vulcan powered viewer 😜 ,and core code dev (you can be sure their code is no mystery to them, just read in Jira, they know it well).  Anyhow.... im rambling on again lol damnit!  ...what I mean to say is there's not really a limit, other than what they choose as the best speed and approach for things, its a conscious choice, always. Time has told they do that quite well IMO, otherwise SL would not have survived and thrived so long, or even have this chance to expand into a new era of offerings. Of course, things take time and effort, with legacy code you have a lot to bring along & evolve, but also a lot of refinement, braintrust, and awareness, thats something someone just flipping all the defaults on of the standard fare most games are made with do not have.

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SL simulator hosts have been running a customized Debian GNU Linux OS on BARE METAL.  There has been time for that to change between when I watched Silicon Mechanics servers racked for LL to when LL announced they were preparing to move to cloud hosts.  Gosh, if they are still using the servers I saw racked they are dealing with 11 year or so old servers.  That seems unlikely.

Edited by TVTuner
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4 minutes ago, TVTuner said:

SL simulator hosts have been running a customized Debian GNU Linux OS on BARE METAL.

Bare metal hypervisor? I want one for a personal pc someday.:P  I've heard certain types of SL regions are clustered onto servers, where the main heavyweight type gets a box to themselves, however, thats how the cloud works too, if you want dedicated hardware per application, its there to turn on, even on amazons AWS. Linden likely has data servers, chat servers, cache servers, and all sorts of various things in their mix and connected together, only difference is they're responsible for all the hardware, since they've built and maintain their own stuff. With the "cloud" they dont have to plug things in and maintain all that hardware, and can more easily load balance, moving things around, upgrade, etcetera, virtually on a nice UI & CLI.

 

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1 hour ago, Macrocosm Draegonne said:

Bare metal hypervisor? I want one for a personal pc someday.:P  I've heard certain types of SL regions are clustered onto servers, where the main heavyweight type gets a box to themselves, however, thats how the cloud works too, if you want dedicated hardware per application, its there to turn on, even on amazons AWS. Linden likely has data servers, chat servers, cache servers, and all sorts of various things in their mix and connected together, only difference is they're responsible for all the hardware, since they've built and maintain their own stuff. With the "cloud" they dont have to plug things in and maintain all that hardware, and can more easily load balance, moving things around, upgrade, etcetera, virtually on a nice UI & CLI.

 

Nope.  Bare metal means no hypervisor.

I'll try to describe what I saw back then.

The computers had two 10G LAN interfaces and a 1G Management interface, each.  There were two dual socket Xeon computers in each 1U chassis.  I think the rack, as shipped, had 40 of those in it and a switch or two and power rails.  It was all wired and tied and ready to feed.  Then it was wrapped and crated and shipped to a data center.  I think at the time they were shipping to Phoenix AZ.

The test harness did not include a hypervisor.  It included an image containing a custom Debian GNU Linux OS and ran some network connectivity tests after booting.  We were told the harness was the same OS to be used in the target environment.

I have read in some "Office Hours" transcripts on the Second Life Wiki that Linden Lab was running one full region per CPU core on an iteration of deployment.  In another transcript was described that when the number of CPU cores per LAN interface got above, 8, I think it was, they left 1 core for housekeeping and used the other 7 for regions.  No clue what's going on in the datacenter now, as all of what I have seen or read about is years old.

Recently it was said, by a Linden, not sure where, that the software used in the simulator hosts was being modified to work properly in the new environments they were testing it in.   I assumed the plural here indicated LL was trying multiple hosting vendors.

Edited by TVTuner
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16 hours ago, TVTuner said:

Nope.  Bare metal means no hypervisor.

I'll try to describe what I saw back then.

The computers had two 10G LAN interfaces and a 1G Management interface, each.  There were two dual socket Xeon computers in each 1U chassis.  I think the rack, as shipped, had 40 of those in it and a switch or two and power rails.  It was all wired and tied and ready to feed.  Then it was wrapped and crated and shipped to a data center.  I think at the time they were shipping to Phoenix AZ.

The test harness did not include a hypervisor.  It included an image containing a custom Debian GNU Linux OS and ran some network connectivity tests after booting.  We were told the harness was the same OS to be used in the target environment.

I have read in some "Office Hours" transcripts on the Second Life Wiki that Linden Lab was running one full region per CPU core on an iteration of deployment.  In another transcript was described that when the number of CPU cores per LAN interface got above, 8, I think it was, they left 1 core for housekeeping and used the other 7 for regions.  No clue what's going on in the datacenter now, as all of what I have seen or read about is years old.

Recently it was said, by a Linden, not sure where, that the software used in the simulator hosts was being modified to work properly in the new environments they were testing it in.   I assumed the plural here indicated LL was trying multiple hosting vendors.

Nice setup! I bet some geeks had loads of fun putting that together haha!  Oh btw "bare-metal hypervisor" is a thing & quite popular in virtualization now, the reason they call it that is the main host OS is so tiny that it takes basically nothing from the other os's running virtualized concurrently, and that host os is installed at the hardware level, above everything else. I always thought it'd be cool to have one as a workstation to run multiple OS, because I love linux but require windows as my main OS. Windows basically remedied this though, at least in the win-10 pro version, you can enable a linux os to always be there running, command line and all, I believe its a debian/ubuntu variant, works great.

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3 minutes ago, Ginger Fellini said:

Any word yet on when the full private islands will be released other than early fall? Are we getting any closer? Any hints? 

Nothing new posted in the blogs.  Best guess from all previous posts is late fall / winter - at the very least, by end of year.  Definitely nothing solid though.

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I dont believe it after seeing 50 new sims added Second Norway. Why were they offered to one company or person and not to others. Now all of a sudden you guys have a shortage. SMH like Second Norway needed to be expanded. Hard enough to find a full sim with blake access but you easily allow them to relocate 50 to the place.

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8 minutes ago, ITMAFIOSO said:

I dont believe it after seeing 50 new sims added Second Norway. Why were they offered to one company or person and not to others. Now all of a sudden you guys have a shortage. SMH like Second Norway needed to be expanded. Hard enough to find a full sim with blake access but you easily allow them to relocate 50 to the place.

You received a good explanation in your other post with the same complaint:

 

 

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13 minutes ago, ITMAFIOSO said:

I dont believe it after seeing 50 new sims added Second Norway. Why were they offered to one company or person and not to others. Now all of a sudden you guys have a shortage. SMH like Second Norway needed to be expanded. Hard enough to find a full sim with blake access but you easily allow them to relocate 50 to the place.

I know nothing about the Blake Sea access part, HOWEVER ChinRey explained the 'regions' part of it AN HOUR AGO in the thread that you started about it:

image.png.df7378b6c5da43244a153002149a4c34.png

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Thanks for the thoughts. I am trying to decide what to do bc I am opening a community sim and would hate to grow traffic and then move everything. Would totally suck. I was hoping to buy something before I open. I am not in a massive rush to open. Its a lot of work to open a developed destination sim. I am watching the threads for private islands but they seem to go super fast. I don't really know the best way to get a sim outside of LL.

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18 minutes ago, ITMAFIOSO said:

I dont believe it after seeing 50 new sims added Second Norway. Why were they offered to one company or person and not to others. Now all of a sudden you guys have a shortage. SMH like Second Norway needed to be expanded. Hard enough to find a full sim with blake access but you easily allow them to relocate 50 to the place.

There is no "shortage", they're simply not adding NEW sims capacity... all the existing sims are fully functional, as are the ones they keep on the side for swapping. Going forward they only want to add new sims on the new infrastructure, which makes sense, since continuing to add hardware to the depreciating system is rather pointless.

3 minutes ago, Ginger Fellini said:

Thanks for the thoughts. I am trying to decide what to do bc I am opening a community sim and would hate to grow traffic and then move everything. Would totally suck. I was hoping to buy something before I open. I am not in a massive rush to open. Its a lot of work to open a developed destination sim. I am watching the threads for private islands but they seem to go super fast. I don't really know the best way to get a sim outside of LL.

Moving the older sims to the new infrastructure should not be much trouble, and seamless to users as well, because they're priming the old servers with new code it seems. lol technical stuff can always have snafu's, though I suspect they'll work out most kinks before migrating existing servers. Oh, and You can generally find full sims for sale in the real estate forums here, or contact in-world realtors, private sales and transfers of the full sims is allowed.

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1 minute ago, Macrocosm Draegonne said:

There is no "shortage", they're simply not adding NEW sims capacity... all the existing sims are fully functional, as are the ones they keep on the side for swapping. Going forward they only want to add new sims on the new infrastructure, which makes sense, since continuing to add hardware to the depreciating system is rather pointless.

Moving the older sims to the new infrastructure should not be much trouble, and seamless to users as well, because they're priming the old servers with new code it seems. lol technical stuff can always have snafu's, though I suspect they'll work out most kinks before migrating existing servers. Oh, and You can generally find full sims for sale in the real estate forums here, or contact in-world realtors, private sales and transfers of the full sims is allowed.

Yeah I am watching the forums as close as I can. People snatch up the full regions fast. haha

I am in a group for full regions sales inworld. Currently am renting a full sim, but I could save about 6k Lindens weekly if I owned it. I will be sitting tight I think, because getting a full island is hard enough, the fact that I need a 20K prim land and not a 30k is making it even harder for me. I am running a beyou community sim where theres farming plots what cannot handle the load of a 30k prim sim. Looks like Im stuck for the time being. 

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1 minute ago, Ginger Fellini said:

Yeah I am watching the forums as close as I can. People snatch up the full regions fast. haha

I am in a group for full regions sales inworld. Currently am renting a full sim, but I could save about 6k Lindens weekly if I owned it. I will be sitting tight I think, because getting a full island is hard enough, the fact that I need a 20K prim land and not a 30k is making it even harder for me. I am running a beyou community sim where theres farming plots what cannot handle the load of a 30k prim sim. Looks like Im stuck for the time being. 

Hmm. Can the region object bonus factor be set below 1.0? But I guess that would leave you paying for the extra land impact with no way to use it anywhere on the regio, so that probably wouldn't work out anyway.

Anyway, I wanted to ask if you really needed an Estate region for your community project. There are good reasons you might, but if not, there are full Mainland regions for sale, too.

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Just now, Ginger Fellini said:

Yeah I am watching the forums as close as I can. People snatch up the full regions fast. haha

I am in a group for full regions sales inworld. Currently am renting a full sim, but I could save about 6k Lindens weekly if I owned it. I will be sitting tight I think, because getting a full island is hard enough, the fact that I need a 20K prim land and not a 30k is making it even harder for me. I am running a beyou community sim where theres farming plots what cannot handle the load of a 30k prim sim. Looks like Im stuck for the time being. 

Perhaps if you made rules about how many prims allowed on the ground you could get around the 30k prim issue? (is that really an issue?) Then dont allow renters to build above say 1,500m, then you can create something different up around 2500+ so people wont load things from either when entering those different zones. Or simply just limit the prims allowance to reflect what you think will perform best at ground level.

Im not sure of your situation, but the 30k prims allowance comes with more server resources, it shouldn't really drag any extra, its more about what are people putting down, texture density/reuse can help a lot, especially in a themed place, a lot of decor/nature things may be using the same textures/mesh anyhow, being sure LOD is proper on things, and mesh density isnt overboard are important too.

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